Generative grammar

Generative grammar

1. Not only do words occur in a linear order (or “string”) but they also enter into hierarchical relationships with one another within coherent units known as “constituents”.

2. This approach to syntax came into being over fifty years ago, and has been the dominant approach ever since.

3. Constituents are the proper subparts of sentences

4. Generative grammar inherited the notion of constituents from the approach to grammar which preceded it called “American Structural Linguistics”.

5. The form of sentence analysis used by the American structuralists was known as “immediate constituent analysis”.

6. The form of sentence analysis used by the American structuralists was known as “immediate constituent analysis”

7. Noam Chomsky argued that immediate constituent analysis, though not wrong, was insufficient since it dealt only with the surface order (Chomsky, 2002).

8. Nor did immediate constituent analysis provide a means of distinguishing between structural ambiguous sentences

9. It is important to distinguish between the two levels for two reasons:

   • 1. different sequences on the surface – as in an active sentence and its passive counterpart
     • 2. similar or identical sequences on the surface – as in a case of structural ambiguity

10. In the classical “standard” form of generative grammar, it was argued that syntax consisted of two types of rules, phrase structure rules and transformations.

    • The phrase structure rules specify what is a constituent of what, or in other words, they reveal the hierarchical structures of sentences.
      • Transformations perform various syntactic operations on the output of the phrase structure rules to produce surface structures.

11. It is the view that in order for a speaker to acquire a language, the rules of the grammar must be finite in number. This finite set of rules must account for the infinite number of sentences that can be produced and comprehended by speakers of a language.

12. Finally, generative grammar is concerned exclusively with the form of sentences, distinguishing between “grammatical” (or “acceptable”) and “meaningful”.

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